


Better Latte Than Never

by demonsushi01



Series: Klance Trope Month 2k20 [9]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bad Puns, Dissection, Flirting, It sounds like its a coffee shop au but i swear it's not, Keith just drinks a lot of coffee, M/M, Of a brain and a pig, POV Lance (Voltron), Shy Keith (Voltron), because it's an anatomy class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24100987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonsushi01/pseuds/demonsushi01
Summary: Day 09. FlirtingLance tries to flirt with a girl in his anatomy class but it doesn't work, or well, it doesn't work on her but the guy sitting next to him. And you know what, that guy is cute too. Win-win.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Series: Klance Trope Month 2k20 [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1727086
Comments: 16
Kudos: 392
Collections: Voltron Stars🌌





	Better Latte Than Never

Lance has long since decided that the worst thing one can do in _any_ class is to not have at least _one_ friend. Preferably, a smart one or one that has good work ethics. It helped him a lot back in high school when he was goofing off. This is especially true in college courses, now that he’s giving it his _actual_ academic all. He’s not even a biology major and yet here he is, a solid fifteen minutes early to his anatomy class for the science credit. His professor is a sweet lady, and she lets him in with some of the other early birds.

He debates on what table he should take, eventually sliding into one of the ones near the back of the class. A pretty girl sits a table away from him to his right, he smiles and waves and she does the same. Most of the class seems to be present but someone pushes open the door in a loud bang due to the rush. They apologize to the professor who gives them a strained smile.

 _Please, don’t sit next to me_. Lance crosses his fingers under the desk, nothing says bad student like turning up late, he should know. Long black hair, black shirt, black pants, everything about them screams _do not interact_ by the way they carry themselves and the fact at least two people flinch when they meet eyes with this person. 

“Keith?” The professor asks.

“Yeah.” Mystery guy says. 

“Sit wherever you like.”

“Thank you.” Keith nods and glances quickly around the room. _He’s kinda cute though_ , Lance hums to himself.

And then Keith moves, drops himself in the seat directly on Lance’s left and he wants to scream. He sneaks a glance at Keith who’s busy digging through his bag, pulling his notebook out and a pen. He uncaps his pen with his teeth, scrawls an angry circle in one corner to make sure it works and then the date. 

Lance pays dutiful attention, even if it’s just going over the syllabus. Keith though is head-bobbing and looks like he’s five seconds from crashing. Lance rolls his eyes and looks over at the pretty girl wondering how he’s going to get her name and talk with her.

.o.0.o.

Keith hasn’t been late since the first day, Lance notices. He comes in on time, paper cup of coffee in hand. He takes all of his notes with his blue ballpoint pen, scribbling in something illegible whenever Lance glances over at it. He continues trying to make friends with the girl, Jenny.

.o.0.o.

They are all instructed to pair up with the person at their table for the lab. Lance groans internally. 

“Ready to cut up a sheep brain?” He turns to Keith and _his_ brain stumbles. Keith’s pulling his hair up to keep it contained and shifts his papers aside.

“Sure.” He hums. “I’ll get the tools?” 

“Yeah.” Lance nods. Keith gets the supplies they need and Lance is passed the brain. Lance watches as Keith carefully slices through it and Lance labels the indicated pieces. He glances over at Jenny and watches her stare at the brain, confused.

“Lance?” 

“Yes?” He jumps and looks to the voice. Keith is giving him a flat look. 

“Are you writing this all down?”

“Totally, can’t you see?” Lance gestures to his paper. Keith sighs and shakes his head. He looks back over to Jenny while Keith reviews his paper. She happens to glance over to him and he leans closer to her.

“Can you fix my cerebellum?” He asks and she tilts her head curiously. “Because I can’t stop tripping over how beautiful you are.” He rests his chin in his palm. She gives him a small smile and then turns back to her work. _Strike one_. Keith snorts next to him and he glances back to his lab partner.

“That was bad,” Keith says, shaking his head and then gets up with the brain remains. “Clean up the tools?” 

“Yeah.” Lance watches the guy toss the brain matter into a biohazard bag the professor passes around. He joins Lance by his side, washing his hands and then tugging his hair down. 

.o.0.o.

It turns out the gibberish Keith writes in isn’t just strange alien handwriting. He finds out because he’s studying with him before a test and he can’t help but ask.

“What even is that?”

“Shorthand,” Keith tells him. 

“Shorthand?” Lance looks at the scribbles and Keith then proceeds to teach him a bit on how to read it. He learns that Keith essentially has the entire lesson, word for word written out and that Keith rewrites what’s important when he gets home.

“Seems like a lot of work,” Lance says and Keith shrugs. 

“It’s what I’ve always done.” He sips from his coffee cup and then frowns. _Must be empty_. Keith sighs and tilts his head back, staring at the ceiling. Lance turns to Jenny instead, she’s staring over in his direction so he waves. She startles and looks at him.

“Are you a pulmonary embolism, because you take my breath away.” He smiles. She laughs but it sounds a bit forced. She looks away from him and he pouts again. _Strike two._

“You’re awful at this, aren’t you?” Keith has his hand covering his face.

“I’d like to see you try,” Lance says.

“I think she’s had enough weirdos hit on her today.”

.o.0.o.

When Jenny glances over at him today, he gives her another line. 

“I sent your selfies to NASA because you’re a star.” He smirks. She gives him another strained smile. _Strike three._ He guesses she’s just not interested in him, so he can drop it. However, he catches a stifled laugh next to him and he carefully looks over to Keith.

The guy has his hand pressed to his face and his shoulders are shaking. It has Lance recount the other two previous failed lines. He realizes Keith laughed at them all, the way a girl like Jenny should have if she were interested. He only has one way of testing it and he waits for Keith to take more notes, exposing his face.

“Even if there were no gravity on Earth, I'd still fall for you,” Lance says, watching Keith carefully and sees his smile and eye roll. It’s all combined with the smallest head shake.

It’s a surprising turn of events, but he’s not about to complain at all. No, in fact, he’s going to have to amp it up the next few days. 

.o.0.o.

Keith certainly warms up a bit more to him, especially after he catches on the lines are for him now. He uses the buttons on Keith’s bag and jacket as his guide to what the guy likes. Especially when he takes the time to swap some out and around. The ones he keeps on all the time are; one that’s a pink triangle with the words ‘silence equals death’, a simple rainbow button next to it, and a safety pin. Today includes an X-Wing fighter, a combadge from The Next Generation, and a simple UFO. 

“I like your buttons,” Lance says during their break. Keith looks over at him.

“Which ones?” He raises a brow and sips on his coffee.

“ _Punks not dead, but Nazi’s should be_ ,” He reads the one pinned to the chest pocket of Keith’s jacket today. “Feel it in my soul.” He catches sight of the smirk Keith has behind his cup.

“Do you?”

“Yeah, man. Also, my niece would go ballistic over the green one.” He taps the space it’d be on him, a simple ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’.

“How old is she?” Keith tilts his head.

“Like seven, but she’s _really_ into it. Over spring break when we went back home, she wanted to just clean up the beach. And we weren’t going to stop her.” He smiles and shakes his head. “It was fun but I wouldn’t let her pick up the glass, even with her gloves on.”

“I remember being like that too. My dad would take me out to these middle of nowhere places that teens would go to after holidays and we’d clean it up because I asked him if I could.” Keith chuckles. He taps his cup, thinking, maybe reminiscing, and the professor calls attention to the class again.

At the end of class, as everyone is packing up Keith taps his shoulder before he can disappear off to lunch. He looks over at Keith curiously who rubs the back of his neck, looking away from him.

“Here.” He holds his hand out. Curious Lance opens his hand and Keith places the green pin in his palm. He looks from it up to Keith a question on his lips.

“For your niece.” He says. “Tell her I think she’s pretty cool.” He passes him to leave the room. 

And when he does go home that day, finds his niece carefully taping two bottles together, he tells her about Keith. That he has a cool friend in college who wears spikes and all black, who’s cool and smart, and thinks that her clean up at the beach was really amazing of her. Her eyes get so wide and excited, even more so when he gives her the pin. She then proceeds to write him a letter he now has to give Keith.

.o.0.o.

Now Lance _could_ have just given him the letter, but he felt like getting him something as well. He gets the guy a thermos and awkwardly stuffs it into his school bag on his way to class. He finds himself getting nervous, heart fluttering in his chest as he waits at his desk for Keith to arrive. 

When he does, coffee cup in hand, Lance’s brain blanks for a moment. Keith has pulled his hair up and Lance was not prepared for the new undercut. He also gets to see the industrial bar in his left ear, along with a few other piercings, that he hadn’t seen before.

“You cut your hair?” Lance manages to ask as Keith sits with him. He groans and rolls his eyes.

“Lost a bet with my roommate.” 

“What was it?”

“Who’d win last night’s UFC fight.” He huffs, pulling out his notebook. 

“My tios do the same with like football and soccer.” Lance snickers. “One lost so badly, he had to dye his hair whatever color we agreed on, and he was this super machista guy, right? Naturally, us kids all went ‘pink’ and not like _dusty rose_ pink but _bright_ _bougainvillea_ pink. He stopped betting for a few years.” 

“I’ve done red before.” Keith hums. “It washed me out pretty bad, looked like a ghost.” He puts the date on the corner of his notes. Lance looks Keith over, trying to imagine it, but he just finds himself staring at Keith’s profile. From how he’s sitting, Lance can no longer see his decorated ear, but he now knows of its existence and even with the buzz cut in the back, he finds Keith to still be rather attractive.

During the break time, he gives Keith the letter from his niece and the guy smiles fondly as he reads over it.

“She has nicer handwriting than I did at her age.” He folds the letter back up carefully, pulling a binder out of his bag and tucking it into the clear panel on the cover. 

“That’s not all,” Lance says and Keith looks over at him curiously.

“What else is there?”

“This.” Lance pulls the thermos out and hands it to Keith whose face turns red. “I always see you with your paper cup so I figured, maybe y’know, you’d want one.” He feels a little silly about it now but Keith ducks his head and looks away from him.

“...I’ve been meaning to get one.” He admits.

“Then I guess I beat you to it.” Lance smiles.

“...Thank you.” Keith glances over at him and then away. _Aww, didn’t realize he was shy._

“You’re welcome.”

.o.0.o.

Keith comes in with the thermos now and Lance notices a subtle shift in their actions. Now when he throws a line out to Keith he gets a bit flustered, red in the face and looking away. Keith actually passes him silly doodles and they play games of tic-tac-toe on their papers. When their fingers brush near each other, Keith lets out a soft gasp every time. 

Lance thinks he’s good at reading people, and from what he’s seeing, he believes Keith _might_ be crushing on him. But he can’t blame the guy. He also has been falling for him, captivated by Keith’s smiles behind the lip of his thermos, the soft laugh from jokes, and the shy glances his way. Keith helps him study and lets him win every now and again at dots or tic-tac-toe and Lance is a fool who can’t help but like him. 

So on the day of their final dissection, though not their final class day by far, he slips a gift card to the campus coffee shop into Keith’s notebook with his number in it, while he gets the tools. How he hadn’t given this guy his number yet is beyond him. 

“Hi, little pig.” Lance murmurs as it’s set in front of him. It unsettles him a bit. Keith places a napkin over its face, feeling the same way apparently.

“You know what?” Keith hums, carefully cutting the pig open.

“What?”

“I finally figured out what the smell reminds me of.”

“The smell? Oh of the --” Lance gestures vaguely, hoping to convey the chemical smell associated with the things they’ve dissected.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it smell like?” Lance notes down on their worksheet some of the parts he sees.

“You’re going to hate me for it.”

“Oh god, tell me.”

“Have you ever been to like, Dairy Queen after they’ve done some cleaning?”

“Oh my god. No!” Lance snaps his head over to Keith.

“It smells like this.”

“No! No, it doesn’t!” 

“It so does.”

“It does and I hate it and I want to pretend you didn’t say that.” Lance whines. Keith laughs softly. 

“Told you, you’d hate me.”

“Awful, awful, awful.” Lance shakes his head. 

He doesn’t get a text later that night, but it’s okay. Keith could be busy after all.

.o.0.o.

“Did you leave me this?” Keith asks, showing Lance the gift card the next time they’re in class. 

“I did.” He smiles. Keith plays with the edges of the card with a blush rising to his face. 

“I’ve um -- I’ve never been to this place.” He says. 

“Oh, it’s pretty good,” Lance tells him, but he can sense Keith has more to his statement. He waits patiently.

“Would you --” He mutters something under his breath he doesn’t catch. “Would you like to go there with me, sometime?” And Lance finds it to be somewhat adorable that Keith doesn’t look at him the whole time.

“Like, as a date?” Lance asks and Keith finally looks over at him. 

“Yeah.” He taps the card anxiously.

“Definitely.” Lance grins. “Can I get your number, because I like you a _latte_.” He winks and Keith laughs with a head shake.

He texts Lance during their break and they go to the coffee shop after Keith’s next class.

**Author's Note:**

> It's been like five-ish years since I took my anatomy class back in college myself and I still to this day remember that the formaldehyde smells like Dairy Queen post-cleaning. I don't think my wife and I have been able to go inside DQ ever since lmaoooo
> 
> We get it through the drive-thru but even then, it took like a year or two
> 
> And I'm sorry if this has now ruined your DQ experiences 
> 
> Feel free to drop me a line here or over at demon-sushi at Tumblr, I do my best to respond to every comment <3


End file.
